Sunday, 31 January 2016

I always knew sharia law in the UK would be a bad thing (indeed it's a bad thing anywhere), and now we have a concrete example.
The pusillanimous pissants in Whitehall agreed a clause to allow the banning of alcohol in a government building used as collateral in their desperate desire to launch a Sharia compliant bond.
Well done fellas. Now suck on that for the next six years when you move out of the cosy halls of the Houses of Parliament.
File under: Idiocy. Craven Submission. Islamopologist.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/639378/British-MPs-Sharia-law-alcohol-ban-Islam

On the vexed question of why the left supports the horrid ideology of Islamism. In sum: because they hate the west and especially the US. Because they are colonialists, imperialists and repressers of poor minority people.

All copied in case it disappears behind a paywall:

Many people watching Jeremy Corbyn's interview on Marr last Sunday will have been shocked by his remarks about the need to begin a 'dialogue' with the leadership of the Islamic State. 'I think there has to be some understanding of where their strong points are,' he said.

Afterwards, when these comments were widely reported, Corbyn's supporters said they'd been taken out of context — the standard defence whenever he is criticised for saying something positive about Islamist terrorists, such as describing Hamas and Hezbollah as his 'friends' or the death of bin Laden as a 'tragedy'. But there are only so many times this excuse can be used to explain these apparently supportive remarks. It's beginning to look as though the Labour leader really does sympathise with terrorists.

It's particularly difficult to make allowances for Corbyn when you take the broader context into account — the historical links between the hard left and Islamism. I'm currently reading The Flight of the Intellectuals by Paul Berman, which, in large part, is about the failure of the European left to see Islamism for what it is: namely, a Middle Eastern form of fascism. Berman documents in painstaking detail how Islamism was transformed into a mass movement by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s to foment anti-British insurrection in the Middle East and as an instrument for carrying out the extermination of the Jews.

The evidence linking Hassan al-Banna, the intellectual architect of Islamism and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, to Nazism is substantial. For one thing, he singled out Hitler as a political role model in one of his political tracts. For another, he was a close ally of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who helped set up a Muslim division of the Waffen SS in the Balkans. The Nazis gave the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies a good deal of resources, including a network of radio stations that the Grand Mufti used to disseminate pro-German propaganda. In 1942, one of these stations broadcast a speech telling all Arabs: 'You must kill the Jews before they open fire on you. Kill the Jews who appropriated your wealth and who are plotting against your security. Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you waiting for?'

Initially, the hard left had no difficulty in condemning Islamism. Tony Cliff, the founder of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote a pamphlet in 1946 drawing attention to the fascist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. But various Trotskyist sects began to warm up to Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in a full-blown coalition in the run up to the Iraq war. In mass protests organised by the Socialist Workers Party and its European counterparts in 2003, Islamists carrying the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah marched with veterans of the European internationalist left, including Jeremy Corbyn. For the most part they got on well, although there were occasional flare-ups. For instance, during an anti-war demo in Paris a gang of Islamists broke off to beat up a group of yarmulke-wearing Jews, even though the Jews had turned up to support the cause.

One reason for the hard left's change of heart about Islamism was straightforward political expediency. Here was an anti-western political movement boasting huge support among disadvantaged groups of young Muslims in Europe's major cities. If Trotskyist front groups like the Stop the War Coalition could harness these disaffected youths to their cause, it might lead to a much-needed injection of energy and resources. And to a limited extent, that tactic succeeded, with new hybrid political groups springing up, such as Respect.

But as Paul Berman points out, it was also an expression of a wilful political blindness. The hard left had so much in common with the Islamists — a history of fighting colonialism, a hatred of Britain and America, a contempt for liberal democracy, a romantic attachment to revolution and a willingness to countenance violence as a tool of political change — that they were prepared to overlook some of their less savoury beliefs, such as virulent anti-Semitism. They were also prepared to make excuses for the activities of their more radical elements, such as the Taleban and al-Qaeda.

Back in the 1940s, few would have predicted that this bastard child of Nazism would find an ally in the leader of the Labour party. But it looks increasingly as though that has happened and I doubt if Labour will ever recover.

Saturday, 30 January 2016

I've written often about the veil and burka in Islam, my view being that they are either symbols of oppression or signals of piety, and either way, problematic.
Western feminists who support veiling in "solidarity" with their Muslim sisters have got it wrong.
Two reforming Muslim women, Hala Arafa and Asra Nomani, have the same view, and make related points about "honor and virginity":
/snip
As mainstream Muslim women, we see the girl's headscarf not as a signal of "choice," but as a symbol of a dangerous purity culture, obsessed with honor and virginity, that has divided Muslim communities in our own civil war, or fitna, since the Saudi and Iranian regimes promulgated puritanical interpretations of Sunni and Shia Islam, after the 1970s Saudi oil boom and the 1979 Iranian Revolution
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/06/do-non-muslims-help-or-hurt-women-by-wearing-hijabs/wearing-the-hijab-in-solidarity-perpetuates-oppression

PS: Asra Nomani reviews a book on woman in Islam, "Excellent Daughters", in The Wall Street Journal"'of 29-31 January 2016.
Sent from my iPhone

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

Loran Salzman is a Green Party leader, that is to say, of leftish persuasion.
There is plenty of evidence that Muslims in the west, even the second generation, self-segregate.
On the issue of advancement, UK government statistics show the Muslim deficit very clearly: of immigrants from India, same background and ethnicity, but different religions, Muslims with university degrees are 20%, Hindus 35% and Sikhs 45%.
/Snip
Had the present Muslim population of Europe proven its assimilation by education, self-monitoring and religious sermons (not to mention self-advancement), you would not have post-Charlie Hebdo graffiti declaring "We are not Charlie." You would have no longer seen veiled women on the streets of Paris. You would no longer have young children harassing women teachers and refusing to obey them. You would no longer have Muslim nurses refusing to abide by sanitary medical procedures. You would no longer see schools knuckling under to demands for halal food. You would no longer see health clubs segregating men and women or providing foot baths. The list goes on and on.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/Lorna_Salzman/Mass_Humanitarianism_is_Suicide,_Not_Altruism/

Tuesday, 26 January 2016

Very interesting article. At once disturbing ("lone wolf" attacks) and optimistic (9/11 style attacks unlikelyar least in the US).

Interesting too, to read of what the US has done in countering the radical Islamist threat, in both psychological and behavioral areas.

/snip

The first such effort [at counterradicalisation] was undertaken by the New York Police Department in the years after 9/11. A 2007 NYPD report concluded that most homegrown jihadist terrorists were "unremarkable" male Muslims, aged 15 to 35. Generally well-educated and middle-class, many had grown up as nonobservant Muslims or had converted to Islam. Most had no formal links to terrorist organizations, but they had undergone some kind of personal crisis—the loss of a job, the death of a close relative, an encounter with racism, a rising sense of moral outrage over the way their fellow Muslims were suffering in foreign conflicts—that provided a "cognitive opening" for a turn to fundamentalist beliefs.

Saturday, 23 January 2016

The left is always right. Until it's wrong. And then its new right (that is to say, correct) views sound just like those of the right always did. At least in questions of Islam and migration. (And the "Arab Spring", now a sad joke of a name given to the disastrous movements since '11, by the left).
The things that socialist French Prime Minister Valls is saying these last few days sound a lot like we've been saying all along [1].
But which, until now, had been slated as being "racist" and "xenophobic".
I guess better late than never.
Sylvia Kauffman, writing in the left-of-centre Le Monde, covers some of the same ground as Valls, in her "Europe's new normal" (INYT today) [2]Questions are now being asked, she says. About time me says. These are questions that have been asked in the conservative blogosphere for ages. Again, I guess, better late than never.
Although it may be too late.
It was all so obvious. That's what I thought and that's what Taki says in the latest Speccie. "It was so clear to me; why wasn't it clear to others", he says. [3]
Especially, why wasn't it clear to mad mummie Merkel?
Her responsibility for making the tide of migration much worse will go down in infamy.

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

The the often made comparison ( by Islamopologists) of Muslims in western countries as being treated like Jews in nazi Germany. Right. Like liquidated.

And comments on CAIR. An insidious organization that has worked its way into the US Administration as the alleged representative of Muslim human rights. It is in fact an Islamist organization an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.

/snip

And her thinly veiled comparison of Muslims in America to Jews during the Holocaust was simply "outrageous," Spencer said.

"Her [Wasserman Schultz] comparison is as outrageous as it is inaccurate. Muslims aren't being persecuted in the U.S., despite the best efforts of groups such as the Hamas-linked CAIR to claim otherwise," Spencer said. "Jews in Nazi Germany were not mounting terror attacks akin to those we have recently seen in Chattanooga, San Bernardino and Philadelphia, and justifying them by referring to their religious texts. She is extremely irresponsible to equate legitimate concern for stopping jihad terror with the persecution of the Jews in Germany, and the effect of her words will be to chill anti-terror efforts and encourage jihad murder of American civilians."

CAIR has been named a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates while its parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been banned as an extremist organization in Egypt, Russia, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The group has some 2,000 chapters in 70 countries and seeks to establish Shariah law through both violent and non-violent strategies, depending on the country.

CAIR was exposed as a front for the Brotherhood in the 2008 terror-financing trial in Dallas, Texas, involving the Holy Land Foundation, which a network of Brotherhood operatives were using to funnel money to Hamas.

Yet, despite court documents exposing CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as part of an international Islamic conspiracy, in the U.S. these organizations enjoy not only acceptance as part of "mainstream Islam" but their operatives also hold positions of power in the Obama administration.

The policy address should be an assessment of Hong Kong's well being and the problems and opportunities it faces and how the government intends to tackle these issues over the next year. The difficulty for Chief Executive CY Leung is that an honest attempt at this opens a Pandora's box. So rather than discuss issues which concern people such one country two systems, constitutional reform changes to MPF, universal pension and so on, he ignored them.

It is true that he touched on livelihood issues such as housing and measures for the elderly but only in the half-hearted impecunious manner that has characterized the Hong Kong government's approach to welfare issues in the past. The Hong Kong government has for years ducked the issue of a universal pension claiming that it couldn't afford it. Meanwhile it happily spends HK$100 billion on questionable infrastructure projects such as Hong Kong -Guangzhou express railway and almost as much again on the Hong Kong-Zuhai-Macau bridge. More

Malaysia was never quite the moderate Muslim country that Islamopologists have held it to be. Its Bumiputra policy was always as Islamically intolerant as it was racist.

Malaysia is now in the slipstream of Islam's globally-growing intolerance. Or, taking "... a more conservative turn" as James Hookway calls it in this article.

/snip

Malaysia, and Southeast Asia, is taking a more conservative turn. The Muslim faith, brought here by Arab traders hundreds of years ago, has coexisted for generations with Malay customs such as shamanism, other forms of traditional medicine and the country's sizable Buddhist, Christian and Hindu communities.

But more recently, conservative Wahhabi doctrines, often spread by Saudi-financed imams, are redefining the way Islam is practiced and, for some, eroding the tolerance for which the country has been known.

Thursday, 14 January 2016

In Sweden, for instance, which like Germany has had an open door, 71 percent of all asylum applicants in 2015 were men. Among the mostly-late-teenage category of “unaccompanied minors,” as Valerie Hudson points out in an important essay for Politico,” the ratios were even more skewed: “11.3 boys for every one girl.”

Telling, that, isn't it. The hugely skewed number of boys per girls. A reflection of the low status of women in Islamic countries.
And:

In the German case the important number here isn’t the country’s total population, currently 82 million. It’s the twentysomething population, which was less than 10 million in 2013 (and of course already included many immigrants). In that cohort and every cohort afterward, the current influx could have a transformative effect.

This is a key insight, the impact of young Muslim men on the young cohort in Germany, not on the whole population.

Douthat describes the terrible assaults in Cologne as not the fault of several dozen youth, but Arab and Muslim culture entirely, the kind of conclusion we’d expect from a Pamela Geller, or a Tommy Robinson.

But that's plain wrong. There were thousands of migrants involved, not just "several dozen". And of course the culture plays a key part.
And:

Speaking of the large numbers of mostly male refugees entering Germany and Western Europe, Douthat writes that “many of these men carry assumptions about women’s roles that are diametrically opposed to the values of contemporary Europe.” How, exactly? He coyly cites a Norwegian curriculum for migrants which notes that “in Europe, ‘to force someone into sex is not permitted.’”
Where, I wonder, is it permitted?

Answer: within marriages in Islamic countries.
Of course the assumptions about women in Middle Eastern Countries are different from those in the West. Pew in 2013 found, for example, the following: 92% of Moroccans and 87% of Palestinians believe a woman should always obey a man. Only 14% of Iraqis and 22% of Egyptians believe that women should have the right to divorce their husbands. And intra-marital rape is not recognised. Rape generally? Look at ISIS. Their justifications are Koranic.
For more on women in Islam, there's the WEF's Global Gender Gap report, which have Islamic countries filling all the bottom 18 countries out of 145 of the world! Howzat, Haroon? Or are the folks at Pew and the World Economic Forum all Islamophobes, out to get Muslims?
See also my Page above: "What Sharia says about women"
There are other absurdities in Moghul's article but I'm just too plain lazy right now to pursue them. Save to say it's more of the usual Islamist obscurantism and victimhood. Moghul is just another Islamopologist.

Germany has a lot to answer for.
First War a Kaiser, Second War a Fuhrer, Third War a Chancellor.
Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to take over Europe; Fuhrer Hitler wanted to take over the world; Chancellor Merkel wants the Islamic world take to over Europe.
Merkel's motivation for her open door policy to "refugees" is simple: she still feels guilty about the Nazis. You can see it from her comments in the video below (0:58). Her view is that Germany is no better than ISIS. As if Germany had not become an exemplary democracy since WW2. As if they had not fully faced and expunged the Nazi horrors.
She is, as son John says, doing a North Korea: visiting the crimes of ancestors on the present generation.
Of course, it's all working out very badly, already. I'd thought it might take some time, but already there's the New Years Eve horrors: now over 500 women have claimed sexual harassment, theft and in some cases rape, by Muslim men, the majority of whom, of those few the police have managed to arrest are recent migrants from the Middle East.The Wall Street Journal investigates this in two interesting articles yesterday:

The Cologne Portent(Dropbox) by Bret Stephens (on WSJ site, $), who I've only recently got onto; he's very solid, a great and insightful writer. Snip:

.... Multiculturalism is a liberal fetish that is also the antithesis of liberalism, classical or modern—a simultaneous belief in individual autonomy and cultural equality, irrespective of whether different cultures believe in individual rights or not.
Typically liberals have elided this incoherence by pretending, as President Obama often does, that Western cultures are no better than non-Western cultures in respecting human rights, or by demanding radical liberalism inside the West while supinely accepting violent anti-liberalism outside it.
But the events in Cologne make a nonsense of this. What was outside the West is now inside. In the spirit of Christian charity, Angela Merkel and other European leaders have imported a culture of Muslim misogyny. In the name of humanity, the benefactors are asked to close their eyes to the brutishness of so many of their beneficiaries.

Years of effort by this administration to deny, conceal and sermonize the nation out of its awareness of facts clearly evident to them is the sort of thing that doesn’t escape Americans in this election season, shadowed by the threat of terrorism. That is a factHillary Clintonmight consider as she goes forth to celebrate her identification with the Obama years.

Obama is making his last State of the Union speech as I write.
He's just said that ISIL (aka ISIS or IS) do not represent "one of the world's largest religions". We need to call them what they are, he said "killers and fanatics".
Very well, but fanatical about what? Are they fanatical racists, Jainists or Buddhists? Of course not. Yet they must be fanatical about *something*. Fanaticism does not exist in a vacuum.
Obama is now talking about "smarter ways" of handling the IS threat.
Surely it must be smarter to recognize the motivation of the fanaticism: Islamic doctrine. "Twisted and perverted", if you wish. Or an extremist, hardline version, by all means. But at core Islamist.
Not to recognize and study the key
motivation of one's enemies is to hobble oneself.
[At least he did not say, as he usually does, that Islam is one of the world's "great" religions. Just one of the largest]
Sent from my iPhone

Tuesday, 12 January 2016

Simple message: China is still buying oil and other commodities. So the drop in their price can't be due to China.
Second: China's equity markets are a tiny percentage of the world total and very few foreigners are invested in them. So how could the swooning markets be China's fault?
Third: all currencies, not just the Chinese yuan, have fallen against the US dollar. How can that be China's fault?
Fourth: it is US consumers, not Chinese, who drive global consumption.
Read on for more by Jake...(or see below fold):

Saturday, 9 January 2016

The latest number I have of German women complaining that they were sexually assaulted by Muslim "refugees" on New Year's Eve, is 150, with two claiming rape. [Later, 14 Jan: now it's over 500!]
Meanwhile the police and Merkel's administration show more concern for the Muslims ("backlash"!) than for the victims.
There's now an official Cologne "code of conduct for women". What about the code of conduct for the rapists: stop raping? Or a code of conduct for the police: catch the rapists?

They're shocked at the mass groping, fingering, stealing, raping even, of over 150 young German women, on New Years Eve, by mobs of young Muslim men.
Whereas, I'm "shocked, shocked I tell you". As in: not at all shocked. It was all so drearily predictable and was predicted by many in the bloggosphere.
Politicians in Germany, and most of its press, have been supine and silent on the possibility that open doors to millions of young Muslim men could be anything other than an unalloyed plus for the republic.
Of course it's not, and there will be more and greater problems to come.
It's not just the German body politic and its mainstream press that are in denial. The global sisterhood is silent too. Lara Prendergast wonders Why are feminists refusing to discuss the Cologne sex attacks?
Ezra Levant tears it apart:

A fascinating article by Asra Q. Nomani. She's an ex-Muslim, having been brought up in a hardline Pakistani madrasa, so she knows whereof she speaks (like ex-radical, now Muslim reformer, Maajid Nawaz).
Followers of matters Islamic will know a lot of what Nomani writes: especially how horrid Saudi Arabia promotes horrid ideology worldwide. Our "ally". Right.
But I'll guess there's detail in here that may be new to the lay reader.

Who knew? That the Philly Mayor, one Jim Kenney, is so well-read on Islam ("Call him Imam Kenney") that he knows, he just knows, that the latest Muslim outrage -- Edward Archer's bungled attempt to murder a cop -- has "nothing to do with Islam". Nothing I tell you.
And that statement was at the same press conference at which his Police Commissioner said that the shooter had said he did it in the name of Islam, because the Koran told him that Allah wanted him to kill the police who maintain the "law of man" (vs the Law of Allah) and that he pledged to the Islamic State.
But no, for Mayor Kenney, "[the shooting] does not represent this religion [Islam] in any way shape or form or any of its teachings".
If a murderer says he's committed murder because he hates blacks (racism), or kills cops because they've jailed a relative (revenge), or because they hate abortionists ("pro-life" nuttery), any of these motives is instantly accepted. Only in the case of Islam, do the left, and Obama's administration in particular, simply refuse to accept the clearly-stated motive of the perp.
It's nonsense of course. There are many justifications in the Koran and Hadith for the attempted murder of infidel cops.One of the many articles covering this. And another.
I guess we just put this down to the category of "nothing to do with Islam", No. 2356.[Later, 14 Jan: "Jim Kenney is an idiot"]

And here are my choices in this little thought experiment of "which favourite dictatorship?"

Saudi Arabia or North Korea: North Korea. They have pubs and clubs. They like a drink and live to sing. Women are uncovered and as free (that is, as unfree) as men. Saudi has not a single theatre, no pubs no clubs, women are wrapped in body bags and the only fun you can have is to be a prince in which case you can consume scotch indoors and poke young boys.

So, get that. I'd rather live in the benighted country of boy brutal Kim Jong-un, than king Salman's sand kingdom, America's best ally in the Middle East.

Saudi or Iran: no question. Iran. (See clip below)

Iran or North Korea: Iran.

So there it is, Iran wins the "best of the dictatorships" contest hands down, at least in my mind.

That is, How to handle a major transition for US relations in the Middle East:

• From Saudi, an ally which shouldn't be.

• To Iran, an enemy which shouldn't be.

The insights of the Israeli diplomat Stephens quotes are interesting. Amongst which:

Take away the mullahs, the [Israeli] diplomat observed, and Iran had civilisational depth, a flourishing, western-leaning middle class, and, by the standards of the region, an open, pluralist society. Any nation in this part of the world that allocated 60 per cent of its university places to women had to have something going for it. Compare this with Saudi Arabia, where the medievalism of the House of Saud has been married to the dangerously extreme Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam.

Indeed.

Many have wondered over the years why it is that the US allied with Saudi when they finance wahhabi mosques and schools around the world, training grounds for violent jihadism.

Answer was: oil.

Answer is: better the devil you know than Isis.

Even so: the US could have/should have been much much more robust in its criticism of Saudis financing terror breeding grounds. Even as we understand that the mullahs may have taken no notice.

Once again it's worth noting that the blogosphere knew and wrote about Saudi perfidy for much longer than the mainstream press which is only recently starting to report on Saudi's malignant Wahhabist funding of terror: via funding of Madrasa schools and mosques in the west.

• As a by-the-by: why can't western countries do what Lee Kwan Yew did in Singapore? He said no foreign funding of mosques. That's it. Full stop. Singapore has managed to keep its very multicultural society, with its substantial Muslim minority, safe and satisfied with that simple policy. No foreign funding for mosques.

• As another by-the-by: I haven't included China in this "my best favourite dictatorship" thought experiment. Because it would win by a country mile. China has it all. All that we have in the west and more. As long as you're not about criticising the leadership then anything goes, and anything does. I know because lived there for many years and now visit often from my home in Hong Kong. You can live a fun and fruitful life in China. It ain't nothin' like the three above.

Friday, 8 January 2016

I
I'm on Charlie's side and not on the side of those who said they "had it coming", when a year ago Muslim barbarians mirdered twelve cartoonists. They killed one woman, and one woman only, because she was Jewish. "We have our morals", one of the barbarians said at the time, "we do not kill women". To them she was Jewish -- "apes and pigs" according to the Koran -- and so not human.
And I'm not in the side of those who still call on Charlie Hebdo to show more "respect" amd "sensitivity". Like the idiot conference of French bishops who asked in a tweet "is this really the kind of controversy that France needs?"

Georges Wolimaki, co-editor of Charlie Hebdo was on BBC radio yesterday, the anniversary of the barbarous murder of his colleagues. He was asked about showing more "respect" to the targets of their satire. "Another word for respect is fear", he said. The Islamists have thousands of things that can set them off, he said. As many as the stars, he said. No use to give in to their demands. They will never end.
Vive Georges, vive Charlie and vive la France.

Thursday, 7 January 2016

Of course it makes total sense to legalize the trade in drugs and remove the money and criminality that infect it now.
I've argued before that with the amount the US spends on the war in Afghanistan, it could buy the whole crop of opium (good for farmers), set up manufacturing facilities to make morphine (good for employment), and give away the morphine to Africa, which is desperately short of analgesics (good for health).
And have money left over to continue the fight against a Taliban thus weakened by the loss of its narco-income.
Sure, easier said than done. But the battle is hardly easy now is it?
This Financial Times article makes a good case for the legalization of the drug trade based on the link with the war on terror.
Minds open time.

I don't quite get Robert Zaretsky's objection to the French government's stripping citizenship from dual citizens "found guilty of acts of terrorism".
Guilty. Of acts of terrorism. That is to say, found guilty of acts intended to mass murder their innocent compatriots. Well, compatriot no more, Muhammad. Back to Syria with you.
I'm not alone in finding Zaretsky's views strange. As he says himself in the article below "an overwhelming majority of French citizens [are] in favor of such a law".
Vive la France. Vive les francais non terroristes. (or something).

When the FBI was going after the mob, the Mafia, in the 70s and 80s they focused their efforts in the Italian communities around the US.
That made sense. The Mafia, la Cosa Nostra, was born in Sicily and grew up in Italy and then in the first Italian communities in New York.
No one at the time called the FBI "Italophobic". Even as law abiding Italians became caught up in FBI investigations, they understood that this was the price to pay for rooting out organized crime.
But hunting out terrorists in our midst seems to elicit different responses when the same common sense tactics are used.
The New York Times, a few days ago, ran an editorial excoriating the French police for raiding Muslim communities in search of would-be terrorists. This was "traumatizing" and "alienating" Muslim communities, upsetting "minority ethnic" citizens.
Oh yeah? Well, too bad. It is surely without doubt that all recent terror attacks in the west have been carried out by Muslims living within Muslim communities.
When asked "why do you rob banks?", Al Capone is said to have replied "because that's where the money is".
The French police are quite right to focus on Muslim communities; that's where the terrorists are.
Shame on the Times for their moral confusion.

Tuesday, 5 January 2016

I've got a lot of time for Ezra Levant. Not all his positions, but those in Islam and the threat of Islamism to the west, for sure.
Have a look at the extraordinary words of Angela Merkel in this clip.
She has a lot to answer for...

Sunday, 3 January 2016

Infrastructure is often the least-appreciated part of what makes a country strong, and what makes innovation take flight. From my spot in line at the post office, I see a country that does both well; not a country that emphasizes one at the expense of the other.

Haha!
The civil war within Islam. It's indeed true, as many commenters have said (and not always islamapologists), that it's Muslims who are most often the victims of Islamic violence.
The situation is Saudi-Iran now looking decidedly dodgy.

Saturday, 2 January 2016

I agree with Tung Chee-hwa that Hong Kong youth should visit China more often to understand this vast country ("Hong Kong must get behind China's vision to join the developed world", December 15). Like Mr Tung, I've been lucky enough to have witnessed China's meteoric rise since 1976, when I first studied in Beijing. Since then, I have visited every province in China. Like Mr Tung, I have seen at first hand the benefits that China's opening has had on ordinary citizens, now part of a growing middle class.

But Mr Tung fails to note the downsides to this "Great Leap Forward". Yes, he mentions corruption and pollution but these are "approved" criticism.

What about the stifling of free speech, quixotic implementation of the rule of law, lax building codes that lead to disasters like the one in Shenzhen, and hegemonic moves in the South China Sea? None of these is mentioned. I do hope that the South China Morning Post (the English-language "paper of record" for Asia, according to the BBC) will continue to cover these important issues.

Peter Forsythe, Discovery Bay

(SCMP cut out only the last bit of the final sentence which was "[...important a issues] and not become the final repository of puff pieces like those of Mr Tung".

Anyway, a bit of a test to see how the SCMP goes under the new ownership of Jack Ma, head of China-based Alibaba. If the SCMP stops publishing letters like this, that's the time to start worrying about free speech in Hong Kong).

"...it is the duty of those who have accepted Islam to strive unceasingly to convert or subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit of time or space. It must continue until the whole world has either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of the Islamic state."

-- Bernard Lewis, renowned historian of Islam and the Middle East, in The Political Language of Islam, p72-3.

In other words:

"Islam is unique among religions of the world in having a developed doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates warfare against unbelievers."